"The working class must have a political party and a political voice. The Socialist Alliance is an opportunity to fill the void that has been left by the Australian Labor Party". - Craig Johnston, AMWU
Conference report by Martin Thomas
Melbourne's trade union centre, the Trades Hall, is a huge neo-classical building. It looks as if it might be the City Hall, or a big museum, until you notice that the monument outside is addressed: "To the Workers who have died as a result of their work". Entering it, you see posters for the pickets at the city's Nike store, run weekly despite heavy harassment from the police, and walls covered with painted tributes to the pioneers of the Eight Hours movement. Melbourne's and Sydney's trade unions were the first in the world to win an eight hour day.
On 4-5 August the Australian Socialist Alliance met there for its founding conference. Craig Johnston, state secretary of the Australian Manufacturing Workers' Union, greeted us and declared: "The working class must have a political party and a political voice. The Socialist Alliance is an opportunity to fill the void that has been left by the Australian Labor Party".
The conference voted support for the "Skilled Six" - Craig Johnston and five other union activists who have been charged with "riot, affray, aggravated burglary and criminal damage" after a protest on 15 June at the offices of Skilled Engineering, a labour hire firm supplying scab workers to Johnson Tile, a company which has sacked AMWU members.
Because of the vast distances in Australia, it was a delegate conference - one delegate for every nine members, elected branch by branch with proportional representation. The 114 delegates represented nearly 1000 members. They were a bit younger on average, I think, than English Socialist Alliance activists. Over a third were under 30, and the great majority under 40. The unions most represented were the CPSU (public services) and NTEU (university staff), and then the AMWU. The conference was more Anglo-Celtic than the cosmopolitan average of Australia's big cities, but almost a third of the delegates originated overseas, from 13 different countries. The Alliance's basic recruiting leaflet is being translated into 14 different languages.
Although the majority of the Australian Socialist Alliance's members must be unaffiliated, most of the delegates who had made the long journey to Melbourne were members of one or another of the socialist groups which took the initiative in February this year to start the Alliance - the Democratic Socialist Party (a pro-Castro group), the International Socialist Organisation (linked to the SWP in Britain), Workers' Liberty, Workers' Power, the Freedom Socialist Party (linked to the US group of the same name), Socialist Democracy (linked to Socialist Outlook in Britain), and the Workers' League. Socialist Alternative, a splinter from the ISO, supports the Alliance, but did not attend the conference. The Socialist Party in Australia (linked to the Socialist Party in England) has not joined the Alliance, and neither has the Progressive Labour Party (a small group, mostly ex-Labor Left or Communist Party).
The Australian Socialist Alliance is running in the Northern Territory elections on 18 August, but its eyes are mainly focused on the federal elections due later this year. The Liberal-National coalition which has governed since 1996 looks almost certain to be defeated by Labor. There is widespread anger against its new Goods and Services Tax, similar to VAT in Europe.
The conference adopted a political platform, "priority pledges", and a constitution. It elected a National Executive (two representatives each from the Democratic Socialist Party and the International Socialist Organisation; one each from the smaller groups; and one each in addition from each of Australia's states and territories) and three National Convenors (Dick Nichols of the DSP, Ian Rintoul of the ISO, and Riki Lane of Workers' Liberty).
The thoroughness of the discussion compared very favourably with the English Socialist Alliance. Eight thick pre-conference discussion bulletins were circulated, and additional amendments were accepted during the conference. Although Australia's problems of distance compelled the Alliance's National Liaison Committee to operate through telephone hook-ups rather than face-to-face meetings, all its proceedings were carefully prepared and meticulously minuted. Their minutes were circulated promptly in the discussion bulletins, so that every member could know who had proposed what and who had voted what way. The conference itself lasted two days, with about eight hours' discussion on each day.
A proposal to include debate in the Alliance's public broadsheet (of which one issue has been published so far) was voted down, but generally the Australian Alliance has a much more positive attitude to political debate than the English. Alliance branches were called on to organise regular political discussion and education, and to have all the left press on their street stalls, with none of the protests that we have heard in England that these things will "put people off". The Alliance will continue to produce a discussion bulletin. Australia's "Marxism 2001", unlike its British equivalent, includes a session on the Alliance where the ISO will debate perspectives with representatives of clearly different views, Dick Nichols of the DSP and Janet Burstall of Workers' Liberty.
A major debate in the Australian Socialist Alliance is about attitudes to the Australian Labor Party. The ALP has not gone Blairite in structure - its links with the unions are still strong - but it pioneered many New Labour policies in government between 1983 and 1996, and offers very little to working-class voters. It promises only a very limited and partial rollback of the GST, and no clear repeal of the Liberals' anti-union laws.
Alliance convenor Dick Nichols talked at the conference about "one per cent, or 0.5 per cent" as a likely average score in the federal election. In its one by-election effort so far, the Alliance gained 0.45% in the Melbourne electorate of Aston. However, the conference felt it would be worthwhile to put down a marker. At the conference everyone agreed that the Alliance should be for a Labor government to replace the Liberals; but Australian voters vote 1, 2, 3... for their preferences, and so left candidates can run without harming Labor's chances.
The DSP has a longstanding attitude of assessing the Australian Labor Party as a "big-business" or "liberal-capitalist" party essentially no different from the Liberals. It directs preferences to Labor before Liberals, on the grounds that a Labor government is a lesser evil than a Liberal-National administration, but to the Greens and any minor party that can half-plausibly be called progressive before Labor.
In the first talks on forming the Socialist Alliance, back in February, the DSP agreed that the Alliance should be clearly for a Labor government.
The DSP has also long campaigned for unions to disaffiliate from the ALP. It was encouraged by the New South Wales firefighters' decision in June to disaffiliate. (In Australia, unions affiliate to the ALP - and have more clout - state-by-state as well as federally. Recent decades have seen a number of disaffiliations, usually short-lived, and some new affiliations, too). The DSP called for the Alliance conference to launch a new drive for unions to disaffiliate.
Opposition from others in the Alliance was strong. Eventually the DSP withdrew its proposal "in the interests of unity". Although the conference defeated a Workers' Liberty motion positively advocating new union affiliations to Labor, it carried a motion from the ISO clearly opposing disaffiliation.
Alison Stewart of the ISO pointed out that disaffiliation had been used as an alternative to an industrial fight - and, at the firefighters' meeting, as a pointer towards support for the Democrats (a party similar to Britain's Lib-Dems, only smaller and a shade more leftish), the Greens, or the far-right One Nation party. "We are for the unions having a political voice, and there is not an alternative at present to Labor". Only recently, union opposition has forced the right-wing Labor government in New South Wales to back down from its plans to privatise electricity supply.
The debate on exactly how the Socialist Alliance should advocate that its voters use their second, third, and other preferences was lively.
It revolved around the question of when we might transfer preferences to the Greens before Labor. Usually the preferences would then pass on to Labor when the Greens were eliminated from the count, but the gesture could help us establish dialogue with people who vote Green because they see the Greens as more left-wing - and more pro-working-class - than Labor.
The Greens won 2.1% of the total vote for the House of Representatives in 1998; have one seat in the Senate; and are a varied lot. Their one Senator, Bob Brown, is much more aligned with trade-union and workers' struggles than official Labor is, but some of them are middle-class politicians posing as "neither left nor right". Their general bias is to transfer preferences to Labor, but a few years ago in Queensland they won a state election for the right-wing National Party by transferring preferences to it.
A Workers' Liberty motion sought to have the Alliance act positively and programmatically, by laying down core political demands with which the Alliance would approach Green candidates seeking transfers of preferences - union rights, support for workers' struggles including struggles to save jobs in environmentally damaging industries. That was defeated; so was a Workers' Power proposal that we should always transfer preferences first to Labor and never to a Green.
Most argument revolved around the ISO and DSP proposals. The actual difference in wording was small; but the debate was lively. The DSP accused the ISO of offering a "blank cheque" to Labor; the ISO charged the DSP with giving a blank cheque to the Greens.
The ISO advocated that we "preference progressive left candidates first, then Greens, then Labor" - if the Green (or "progressive left") candidate have "pro-working-class credentials" and pass on preferences to Labor before the Liberals and Nationals. Otherwise we should direct preferences straight to Labor. The DSP wanted to preference all Green candidates before Labor for the upper house, the Senate, and all "pro-working-class" Greens (with no requirements about how they pass on preferences) before Labor for the House of Representatives.
Senators are elected, 12 from each state, through proportional representation - so the Greens can get one or two seats there. The DSP's argument is that the Senate does not decide who will form the government, so it is more important to get any sort of halfway leftish dissident elected there than to take a stand for Labor against the Liberals. The House of Representatives is elected by "alternative vote" (redistributing preferences until one candidate has 50% plus one of the valid votes) in 148 constituencies.
The DSP won the vote, 55 to 38. Alison Stewart of the ISO linked this debate to others by arguing that it was about the audience the Socialist Alliance should look to. "The new anti-capitalist activists are not our principal audience", she said. "If the Socialist Alliance is to become a force, the people we have to win are those who are in or around the Labor Party. We must find ways of connecting anti-capitalism to that much broader range of people who are moving to the left on more immediate issues, but it is not true that the anti-corporate activists have all broken with Laborism".
There was also lively debate on many aspects of the Socialist Alliance platform. The ISO argued for a very stripped-down, limited, platform, in the name of appealing to "old Labor" voters. "Why do we want an old-Labor set of demands?" asked Phil Griffiths of the ISO. "There is a real cleavage opening up, and a possibility of turning a section of the working class against the Labor Party". "I'm not interested in demands", declared another ISOer, Brian Webb. "I'm interested in connecting with people who want change".
Lynn Smith, also from Workers' Liberty, argued that the ISO was treating the platform as a mere "marketing exercise", rather than a serious effort to "put the 'C' word [class] back into politics".
Graham Matthews of the DSP commented that the ISO was getting itself into a mindset where it would denounce any demand reaching beyond defence of what already exists (or what very recently existed) as excessively revolutionary! The DSP argued for more radical demands on a number of issues, claiming that they would be supported by the new anti-corporate activists.
Workers' Power, and some Australian sympathisers of the CPGB (Weekly Worker), put full-scale alternative platforms to the conference, rather than amendments as their counterparts in England did at the English Socialist Alliance conference. Those alternatives defeated, there were several debates on particular issues. The results were mixed.
The most hard-fought was an attempt by the ISO to delete "open borders" from the platform. That demand was too revolutionary, they said. We should demand only a better deal for refugees. They lost the vote 37 to 61, after a strong speech by Alison Thorne of the Freedom Socialist Party for "open borders".
Australia, despite the cosmopolitanism today of its big cities, has a long history of protectionist and nationalist politics in its labour movement. Today, support for restrictions on immigration is given a "left" twist in Australia by Greens who argue that those restrictions are necessary to protect the continent's fragile environment from being damaged by too many people. Maybe undercurrents of that sort influenced the ISO. In any case, the platform was given an oddly nationalist twist by the inclusion in it of a call for Australia to withdraw from the World Trade Organisation. Riki Lane from Workers' Liberty argued that this demand - in context, a call for a bourgeois Australian government to withdraw from international capitalist arrangements to negotiate free trade, and not a projection about the relationship of a future Australian workers' government to the world market - actually amounted to a call to restore tariffs, and had "reactionary implications". It was, however, adopted with support from both ISO and DSP.
The ISO tried to delete opposition to government subsidies for private schools (they wanted instead only to oppose subsidies to wealthy private schools); to remove a call for the police to be disarmed; and to resist inclusion of workers' control in the platform (in amendments from Workers' Liberty, on the environment, and from Phil Sandford of the Workers' League, on the fight for jobs). On all those they lost the vote heavily.
The ISO did, however, with the support of the DSP, secure adoption of their version of "priority pledges" for the Socialist Alliance, a list of 17 demands which opened with scrapping the GST and taxing the rich, but included demands such as full funding for the official Australian Broadcasting Corporation and support for the Kyoto protocol on global warming. The alternative was a draft from Workers' Liberty, organised more tightly around four basic ideas (taxing the rich to rebuild public services, union rights, a democratic Republic, workers' control against the profiteers to secure jobs), but with link to an argument working-class struggle as the agency to win the demands. The Freedom Socialist Party and the Workers' League supported the approach of the Workers' Liberty draft, but the ISO and DSP argued that it was too elaborate and too revolutionary.
The debate is not closed. The Alliance has agreed to follow up its conference with a series of seminars and forums in different cities to debate policy in more detail.